 The Archaeological Research Facility is located at Wieschen, the ancestral and unceded territory of Chachanya-speaking Ohlone people, successors of the historic and sovereign ban of Verona Ban of Alameda County, who acknowledge that this land remains of great importance to the Ohlone people and that the ARF community here merits a history of archeological scholarship that has disturbed Ohlone ancestors and made it comes to a race living Ohlone people from the present and future of this land. For our collective responsibility, we critically transform our archeological inheritance and practice in support of Ohlone sovereignty and to hold the University of California accountable to the needs of all native and indigenous peoples by our actions as well as our words. So today, one of our brightest and best has returned to us. I'm all the way back up from the south to rejoin us. Dr. Felicia de Pena, who is Senior Project Director at Powerhouse of Archaeological Research and Theories, Statistical Research Incorporated in Redlands, she's back and I won't read her the title of her talk, you can read it for yourself, but she has worked closely with Dr. Carr, Dr. MacDonald out of the Epileptic Voyager sites and at Corona 4. She has taught us all in her tenure here before she became Dr. de Pena and Mystic Technology. She's done an amazing amount of work with Experimental Archaeology and is definitely one of those folks we point to as having raised the bar for our graduate program. So we're so glad to have her back. Join me in welcoming her. Thank you, June. I appreciate it. And thank you all for having me here today. I do want to start off really quickly with a thank you to Dr. Lisean-Hare, Dr. Carthelite Foot, and Dr. Jeffrey Sass without you guys. It's just been incredible to have you to be able to bounce ideas off of and to work back and forth and kind of build this dissertation and really what I'm going to be presenting here today. I'd also like to thank the ARC for all of the funding and the workshops and the faculty and for technology, right? Like all of this modeling that I've done, I wouldn't be able to do without access to the ARC. I'd like to thank Theresa Parquette because she's the one who taught me how to plant athlete cores. And as you guys are going to see, this is all about something. So I'd like to thank her for her time and her love of rockhounding and are fascinating discussions about rocks and how they turn them into blade cores. And then finally, I'd like to thank all of the plant nappers that participated. I had 12 novices and 12 skilled plant nappers participate in order to produce the experimental, the experimental basically all of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pieces of debitage and blade cores. So I want to thank everybody who participated in this because without it, it would not be what it is. So today I'm going to be discussing the identification of novice plant nappers and the archaeological record. So we all start off as novices and I love this picture. We start off as little kids, like even just adults coming to new technologies. We start off as novices and our knowledge of how to perform skills and tasks is inherently and culturally constructed and balanced. So the ways that we learn from effects, how we learn a particular technology through an experimental plant napping project, I was able to demonstrate statistical significance and differences between novices, intermediates and master plant nappers in blade core technology specifically. So I kind of ask, why is this important? Why do we need to know when we're looking at a blade core reduction? Why do we need to know that a novice or a master need it? And this allows us an extra peek into the past to be able to look at who's producing what and where and be able to understand these social relationships. So do we have masters interacting with novices, masters with masters? It's important to know. And when we're kind of faced with this, when we dig this up out of the ground, how do we tell that this is somebody who's masterful and how do we tell that this is a novice who's utilizing a completely different chain of explore or somebody like if this isn't following the chain of operations that we're expecting? Is it a master who's coming in from a different place, right? So there's so many different ways that we can interact with a blade core that maybe doesn't follow the norm. So we're going to kind of explore that a little bit later. First, I'm going to talk about for on a four and kind of situate us. So this is, you know, math would be in your east. So what we've got for on a four is an aggregation site. So it's an aggregation site that dates to 18,600 to about 19,800 LVP, right? It's generally an aggregation site considered to be an aggregation site, but we have millions of different lithics, all of different many different type of like typologies. So we have microliths are the major form of tool technologies that are used during the epithelial lithic broadly, so not just at Parana, but throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Middle, sorry, microliths are the type of tool that people predominantly use during this time period. The thing to note is that most sites don't have more than one or have a small selection of microlithic tool shapes. So kind of like rectangles or triangles, crescent shapes, right? Most sites only have a small handful. Parana has dozens. It has many different types of tool shapes, final tool shapes and all of the or not all, but most of the lithics are actually formed on local flint. So coming from about 15 kilometers away, which means that people are coming from different places and bringing their knowledge to the site and utilizing the local flint and kind of adding their, you know, their their understanding of what the tool is to the local resources. Other things that we find at Parana for there have been burials, there are huts, thermal features, activity areas, beads, a lot of funnel remains. So it's a really diverse site. And you can see there's there's significant kind of housing that's going on. So we know that there are huts structures that people are engaging with and that they're basically periods of hunting. So there's a very significant component of people actually living at this site. And we have flint mapping floors, which we'll talk about a little bit. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get too much into the flint mapping floors in this conversation. But hopefully in the future, we'll kind of explore those a little bit further. There is a flint mapping floor that we will be looking at that's that's dated to the early epithelia with it. And we'll kind of spend more time on that one. But I'd like to talk from from flicks to people. So when we're looking at debatage, right, when we're looking at when we're looking at debatage, we get a big, massive collection of hundreds or thousands at Piranha. Oftentimes it's thousands of pieces of debatage. Right. How do we get to the to the people? How do we get to the knowledge from it? Right. And so here I've got a refit blade core that I that I worked on. This one's from a middle Paleolithic site for sorry, middle epithelia with a part of Piranha 4. So it postates early epithelia with the material that we're going to be looking at. It has a very similar reductant structure. So we're going to talk about this in just a second. And I do want to point out some of the problems across the bottom blades are the predominant like this. It's the goal for these blade cores. You can see the core has both shaped front here. This is the same blade core from two different styles. And so so basically what this blade core allows a port napper to do is create these consistent blades that are very regular in shape. And you can turn those into Michael's very quickly, right? You can snap them off, snap at the bottom, snap at the top. You've got a tool. You can press your plate them. You can change them and modify them very quickly. It really like to hurry around, right? So instead of tearing around the big rock, you carry around a handful of these little blades and they're just incredibly light and durable, especially on this one. The chenna patois that we would usually see in blade like this or blade cores like this. So this one's one that I refit. We have early phases where we have a crested blade kind of coming off here early. And then there's core tablets. So we have one, two, three little core tablets. We can see them on the opposite side, two, three. And then additional blade core or crested blades here. But these are all kind of earlier reductant pieces that we would see that come off of the first stage of the first few stages. So you see that somebody's gone through and taken the cortex off of this side, unless the cortex on that side. So we'd see like, you know, initial reduction phase would include that cortex removal and creating these nice platforms for people to go through and actually start setting platforms and creating blades later on. The second stage we have going through people who are producing larger blades like this one. So those blades can then be used for more specific tools. So we can, we see people are using them for burins. People are using them to make scrapers and other types of tools that are heavier duty. But they're less common than the blade blades, right? So the ultimate goal is the blade blades for these particular tools. Finally, once we once we get past this kind of initial larger blade removals, we end up going for these smaller blades here. So these little bladelets are generally five centimeters long or a little bit shorter, right? And so these bladelets are ultimately the goal. And in order to maintain this core phase, right? In order to be able to consistently produce these blades off of a core like this, you have to actually correct things. So we see this like partially ridge blade down here that actually changes the face of the core. It changes the angles, takes off additional material. So that way a flint knapper can then continue to take more blades off of this particular blade core. So it's a combination. It's never the same thing, right? So if you're going to flint nap one of these cores, it's never going to be like ABCD, right? It's a set of ideas, a set of processes, a template that you're using to kind of generally approach the reduction of this blade core and then fixing problems as you go. So flint napping is basically mostly just problem solving. Yeah. And then the last thing, once we get down to these parts, again, they can get turned into tools really quickly. And then that's the ultimate part. So in my experiment, what I've been doing is focusing on the production of these blades as opposed to the tool production afterwards. So you'll see the work will really stop at blade production. I do want to say it's important for us to keep in mind that all the flint nap debatage that we're looking at and we'll look at was produced by people who lived, worked and learned and interacted within a community of practice. And so this community of practice ends up shaping the way that they approach these problems solving techniques. So fundamentally, I've got three kind of theoretical paradigms that I've used to structure this experiment. So situated learning is a common one that we learn here in the department. So situated learning is really pushing that masters and novices are interdependent, right? They need to be together in the same space. Masters are teaching novices, but novices are also carrying on a tradition. And so in order for tradition to continue, you need both masters and novices coexisting and working. And so these novices are just basically learning through these peripheral interactions to become more skilled at something at a particular skill. Channepatoir is that chain of operations, right? Those reduction sequences that I was just talking about. And so basically, Channepatoir is a the mental effluent nappers or too much anybody who's producing something is it's a mental template for people to follow. It's not necessarily a set of instructions. It's not a set of, you know, if you go through first, you have to do this and then you have to do that. It's a general gist of how to approach these technologies and the production of them. And then finally, genetic processes. So this is coming from Saxon-Vygotsky and they're really pushing that a that a technology and knowledge is a history of knowledge. It's not just a simple thing that has been learned. It's every single person who has interacted with that knowledge beforehand and it's acquired through a lifetime. So when you get a piece of knowledge from somebody, they've learned it from somebody else with a certain perspective and then they've learned it from somebody else with a certain perspective. And so this continues on and on. So these bodies of knowledge have long histories that are affected by events in the past. So going from knowledge to skill, right? So we have we have knowledge, which is incredibly important. So we know that we have particular bodies of knowledge that exist, particular ways of approaching this tool reduction. What does that mean for skill? So skill is one of those kind of fluffy terms that we use, right? There's so many different aspects. Traditionally, the way that lithics skill is approached is regularity, complexity, symmetry, right? So a lot of more aesthetic ideas of what skill is. But there's also ideas of minimal platform preparation, minimal variation. There's also like minimal thickness for the width of a particular mythic artifact, right? And so all of these are most of them are based in assumptions. And so there's there's some issues with some of them, because a lot of times, you know, as archaeologists, we see like, OK, this is this is kind of what we see most commonly, right? This is what they're this is what their goal was. This is what the aim was. And so we're kind of assuming and placing our ideas of what is normal or what is commonly produced. We're just kind of assuming that that's the ultimate goal. That was what was considered skill, right? And I think that that's this problematic to kind of view the way that we see like regularity, right? To kind of force those ideas on an ancient past, right? There's there's ethnographic examples where people are considered highly masterful but produced things that the ethnographers were like, what's this? Like, why is this the same? And that that's like what's it? Katharine Weidman Arthur, she did some really interesting work on that. And it was like looking and exploring the different ways that that these people were considered skillful. But so so moving on from from those from those approaches, there's a significant body of research that then pushes that skill should kind of move away from those ideas and really take into effect on a sense, right? So the knowledge, right? And then combine it with Savar for know how. And so again, those are also two very fluffy terms, right? Knowledge and know how. How do we turn that into something productive that we can analyze, that we can mobilize, that we can actually use to understand the past? So what I ended up doing in order to approach knowledge and know how was I did an experiment, right? So we had a whole bunch of novices, 12 novices who signed up to participate in a footnapping experiment. They did 10 footnapping sessions with me. Of course, this was over like during COVID. So we had to do this via via Zoom. So this is a still for one of our from one of our Zoom footnapping sessions where people were like basically like footnapping. So we meet together a couple of times a week in some cases. I held multiple footnapping sessions each week and people could come as it fit their schedule. And we went after about 90 minutes a day. Each person was responsible for producing 10 blade force over that time period. And so they were basically footnapping together. We had kind of a nap in via Zoom. So this particular experiment here was set up to explore the following six questions. So do skilled footnappers make more mistakes than the... Or sorry, do unskilled footnappers make more mistakes than skilled footnappers and what types of errors are there? Do unskilled footnappers produce less courting elements than skilled footnappers? Do unskilled footnappers prepare�서 platforms less frequently than skilled footnappers? Do unskilled footnappers batter or crush platforms frequently or more frequently than skilled flat footnappers? Do unskilled footnappers or unskilled footnappers able to make blades from blade course consistently? And then are unskilled footnappers able to effectively utilize their footnappings tool kits in order to make successful removals. So each one of the flint nappers was given all the flint that they needed. And then all the protective gear, they were given hammer stones. So hammer stones of various sizes. They were given fillets in order to potentially effectively reduce these cores. They were also assigned some readings, so some basic flint napping, like background readings, some Whitaker. And then they were given a couple of short videos to watch regarding flint napping and blade port technologies. I gave them some of this background information because it's important for them to be able to kind of have some general understanding. Because I strongly believe that people in the ancient past would not have had flint napping in a completely separate place where only flint nappers can know. And there's most likely some interaction of the general idea of flint napping. So I thought it was important for the flint nappers to have at least a little bit of background. The novices themselves had to have less than five hours of flint napping experience in order to participate. And so it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun troubleshooting and dealing with all of the questions. I had so much fun with one for this. The skilled flint nappers, they went through different processes. So the skilled flint nappers, I worked with VPSK, the Puget Sound Nappers up in Washington. And they were wonderful. They had been hosted in Nappin. I sent them a whole bunch of flints. And they hosted in Nappin. And they produced. So there were seven people. And each of the people produced two blade cores. And they sent them back. I also went on to a flint napping blog site and found a couple of other flint nappers who were willing to participate. So I had two additional flint nappers. And then myself and Teresa Barquette, she and I produced five other blades or blade cores in order to analyze and compare these different skill levels. Everybody had to report their skill level. So they're reporting either novice, intermediate, or master. And then basically I used those reported skill levels to create a basic understanding of skill. So I ran all these statistical, I did a whole bunch of statistical analyses to kind of cluster what looked like skill from the reported skill. And then I kind of pulled what I thought was an indicator skill and retested it. And so actually a lot of people got shifted. So a lot of people who had reported to be master had been shifted down, not down, but had been shipped into novice based off of performances that kind of got flagged in these skill indicators. And so I didn't even like I had expected to show up as an intermediate. And like two of my cores were master. And I was like, ha, ha, ha. And the other three were like intermediate. So it was like, it's exciting. Let's see. We're gonna get into the stats here real quick. So I'm gonna try not to get terribly bogged down. And this is where the assigned skill level versus, sorry, the reported versus assigned skill level is important. So for the skill level clusters, we did a K or I did a K cluster. And so what we have are the Z score values. So this is skill people. So we see some people are highly, they're producing blades, core trimming elements, multifaceted platforms very frequently. And irregular blades, which are blades that don't have a very regular form. They're producing those pretty frequently. Regular blades are blades that have straight edges. And then extremely regular blades have multiple parallel lines on the dorsal surface and have a quote like perfect like form, right? Where they taper at the end. They just have this very, they have an extremely regular shape to them. So they just kind of all look like they didn't pop out of the exact same machine, right? And so we see that skilled people are able to produce all of these blade types frequently and unskilled people are not, right? Like they're producing lots and lots of blades, right? So then to kind of push this a little bit further, I split it apart and did the K cluster analysis between novices over here. So we have novices are not really producing blades. They're not really producing core trimming elements all that much or multifaceted platforms. They are producing lots of battering. Lots and lots of battering, which was interesting and actually like when you look at the video, you can actually see it, right? It has to do with like the angles that they're using. So they're battering a lot of these platforms. And it makes sense, you know, I absolutely did the exact same thing. And so then again, kind of have this negative correlation with blades, so regular, regular and extremely low. We have the intermediate people here. You see that they're actually producing a significant amount of irregular blades and a pretty decent number of regular blades and producing blades quite regular as well. And then in the middle, we have the masterful flint snappers, consistently producing all of the blade and core trimming elements and the multifaceted platforms. And then pretty much like they're the main producer of these extremely regular blades and are producing a lot of regular blades. So these are kind of the main non-metric. So these are the main morphological traits that I tested for skill. And so this was the way that I kind of separated out novices, intermediates and masters for the upcoming stats. So some of the things that I tested for, we've got skill, again, questioning skill, multifaceted platforms, really important, right? That was one of those things that was assumed earlier on. One of the questions that I wanted to ask, we see, so this is the mean across all of the, well, basically per core, right? And so we see that masters are producing over a hundred per core on average versus intermediate or novices are producing nine per core. Single faceted platforms, which are non-prepared. So these unprepared platforms where somebody's not actually like shaping the platform before they produce it was pretty consistent, right? Across all of them. So 52, 46, 50, across all of those skill levels. When we look at that blade regularity, we see that irregular blades, this is the mean, so the average per core. Novices are producing less than one on average per core. Intermediates are producing about six, masters about four. When we move over to those regular blades, novices are producing even less, so 0.4 per blade or per blade core on average. Their intermediates are producing six or 7.6 and the masters are producing a lot. They're producing almost like 40 in some cases, right? Sorry, not 40, 19, it's really hard to see. And then on the extremely regular side, it's mostly masters who are producing extremely regular blade cores, right? So it almost 16 blades per core that are extremely regular. So we see that there's the significant shift where masters are much more capable of producing the extremely regular blades consistently and regular blades consistently as well, but intermediate people are consistently able to produce blades, right? I wanted to test the correlation between platform, between platform preparation and blades. So blades, core trimming elements and then irregular blades, regular blades and extremely regular blades. So here we have the Pearson's correlation coefficient for each of those types. So this is a relationship between multi-faceted platforms, the paired platforms and the number of irregular blades. So we have a positive relationship here, the number of prepared platforms and the number of regular blades, a very positive relationship here, the most positive. And then extremely regular blades in the middle. So again, another positive relationship. And then over here on this side, we have those portraying elements which are used to shape that core in order to produce more blades, right? Again, we have that positive relationship between these multi-faceted core or multi-faceted platforms and the number of portraying elements. And here the total blade count per blade core and the multi-faceted platforms here. So we're gonna compare that to the single-faceted platform. So these non-faceted platforms. And we see that there's no relationship really. So there's a negative relationship but here's the irregular blades, not really a relationship. We have a negative relationship between the regular and the single-faceted platforms and other negative relationship between the single-faceted platforms and blades and then not much relationship between the portraying elements and blade counts. I just kind of wanted to present to you the actual like the numbers behind it. So this is for those multi-faceted platforms where we have statistical significance for all of them. And then for the single-faceted platforms, there's no significant relationship between the actual faceting of the blade core and the blades that are produced. Got a couple more to go through. So we've got this punctual blade. So now sequential blades are one or two or more blades that were removed that we fit to each other, right? Which means that somebody took off a blade and then was immediately able to sneak off another, potentially another, right? So there's multiple blades that were removed immediately one after the other. Notably only five of the blade cores were considered master blade cores. So five of five got sequential blade removal, right? The novices, most of them did not have any sequential blade removal. There was 18, yeah, 18 out of over 160 blade cores had refitting removals. And then intermediates, most of them did have refitting, but some of them didn't. So three didn't have any refitting blades or blades on the blades. And then over here, we just have a general overview of the averages for each of the blade cores. So we have clips are most commonly produced. Masters are producing a lot of smaller flakes versus novices are producing less but larger flakes. Blades, we see consistently, masters are always producing more blades or more blades than everybody else. So it's like 38 blades per blade core. Novices are producing one on average and that's rounded up. So producing about one blade per blade core and then intermediates are producing 17. So we kind of have this very clear difference in how much people are able to produce per blade core. And then the core trimming elements I think is the most important here, where we have novices are producing one and usually those are tablets or kind of those earlier stage core, core preparation elements. And then we have intermediates were producing about four, four to six and then we have masters were producing 20. So they're consistently producing these removals that they need to be able to produce in order to create more blades, right? So I think these are very useful ways for us to kind of broach skill. That wasn't all of the stats. So if that these kind of, we'll go ahead and read up here. I'll read some of them off for you. But there was a length width ratio that really only allowed for skilled, unskilled designation. We have length, which is predominantly skilled and unskilled. We have width, which again is predominantly skilled and unskilled proximal thickness was a really great way for us to approach novice, intermediate and master. So this kind of goes back to those multifaceted and single faceted platforms, medial thickness. So the thickness of a particular blade or any removal is also useful for novice, intermediate and masters. So usually if they're consistently thin removals for these blades or kind of indicates skill and it indicates master. Distal thickness kind of in between. So that was about half skilled and unskilled and then half novice, intermediate and master. And then finally, mass. Mass was less useful for determining skill level. You could determine it through novice, intermediate, master, but less on the skilled, unskilled and no indication for these qualitative factors that we can talk about in the beginning, platform preparation. So a lot of platform preparation indicates intermediate and masterful individuals. High blade frequency indicates master. High portraying element frequency indicates masters. High, sorry, sequential blades indicates intermediate and masters. Irregular blades tend to indicate novices or intermediate individuals, regular blades as intermediate and master. Extremely regular is associated with master. Blade cores themselves, so artifacts that can be identified as blade cores with removals or intermediate and masters. And then flake cores are pretty decently associated with novices. I'm gonna say in the experiment, right? Because archeologically flake cores are used for very different things, right? Than blade cores. So with that, I created a skill assessment questionnaire. So that way I could apply all of that information to archeological assemblages. So the first one here. So we have our blade cores present, yes or no. Sequential blades present. So these just kind of go through all of those questions that we, or all of those aspects that I had just outlined in that last slide. And they get points. So basically no, plus zero points. Yes, plus one. These are ranges. So these are based off of the averages that I got those significant averages that I got through the stats. And so novices tending to get like less than 2% of it, of each assemblage as a quarter of an hour, right? So novices need to get zero points here. If it was less than 7%, then that indicates an intermediate one point and then two points for over 8%, right? And so basically I used that information to create this skill assessment questionnaire. Once you add all of them up, if you've gotten zero to five points, you're a novice, six to 11 points or intermediate and 12 to 17 points, you're a master, right? This is kind of fun because then you can kind of rank people as well. So then you can kind of see like, oh, this is kind of a lower range master, right? So some people are scoring like 13 or some people are scoring 12 and it's like, okay, great. Like this person is like skilled, they're intermediate and they're showing off this skill. They're almost there, right? And you can kind of like go back and forth and see like where they rank within that skill level. This I tested by using three cores that I produced. So one I produced when I was first learning how to flint nap, one that I produced in like 2020 when I was kind of getting it. And then one that I had produced after doing like an entire summer of flint napping just gearing up for this project. And so like they fell right in novice intermediate master just Bing Bang Boom. So that made me feel much better about this particular questionnaire. I also, because I'm focusing on caches, also did a cache test where I was looking at the caches and basically created a representative cache and tested it using the same thing. And I was able to tell the difference between skilled and unskilled individuals where like the caches basically, the intermediate cache got moved up. So it was like a low level master's cache and the master cache stayed very high ranking master. So where it had initially I had the entire assemblage it had been intermediate because of the caching event it got boosted up into like a low ranking master. All right, so in the last few minutes so I'm gonna go into these caches and actually like look at the archeology of them. So all of these caches are coming from early epithelialithic assemblages at Paranum. And so here we've got these three caches here which are distinct caches. This is the flint napping floor that I was talking about earlier. And then so we have these concentrations so one, two, three concentrations. So this checkered board pattern here indicates this very unique material it's this translucent flint that I was able to track across various parts of this region and tested that because it was very unique and not a particular material that we see at Paranum very often. So let's see here, the floor that I'm looking at so zero four three is that large flint napping floor. And so that post eights the huts so it's stated after 19,200 years. And then I did pull another cache from another part of site. So this is the area at E, it's also early epithelialithic and the radiocarbon dates underneath of, underneath of zero 14, the one that I'm looking at that's also rated age to 19,200 years. So they're about the same time period. And this one's a little bit earlier most likely than these zero four three in the other site. So really quickly, all of these cache number fours there were seven of them that I focused on. There were seven refit sequences with a total of 30 refits here. None, none, none on two, three and four. Cache number five had 17 refits or sorry had two refits and then one refitting sequence. This clear concentration that I was telling you about with those checkerboards had a total of 199, five of those were refitting in two different sequences. And then that area E cache had a total of 158 with 32 refitting artifacts and 13 separate refitting sequences. So we're going to take a look at these. This is the most highly skilled so the one that we saw in the beginning was the most highly skilled cache. So when we have them in the process have these refits here, these are all refits here the blades, the tools, the blade core itself. And so this one ended up being ranked at 16. So almost the highest rate. So out of 17, it got 16, very masterful. There's sequential blade removals, a diverse array of portraying techniques and in prepared platforms. It's just really went through and kind of showed all of the different techniques and skills that you would need to be considered a masterful core. Again, this is the most masterful out of all of them and we'll kind of look at this, it's the dispersal on the second. Lithic cache number two, this one ranked a little bit lower, this one was at a 15. Again, so this one had a high frequency of thin and prepared platforms and one pair sequential blades. So not as many as previous. It also had a high blade to flake ratio and high proportion of regular and extremely regular blades, which is easier to do when you have a smaller cache. There's issues with the caches that I'd like to explore a little bit further. So number three and number four, these two show the least amount of skill out of all of them. So they come in as a 13, which is the bottom of masterful. So intermediate ends at 12 and masters at 13. And so these two are showing less skill than all of the other caches and concentrations within the area. And they have a high flake ratio, flake to blade ratio, but also not any regular, extremely regular blades. They're mostly irregular. Concentration number five had a score of 14. There's a wide variety of different portraying elements that are taking place here. So that's kind of why it's scored so highly. But there's also a large number of extremely regular blades. Look at concentration number six. One of my favorites, this one, I spent a lot of time refitting. As you can see, there's over like 30 refits here. And they're extremely consistent. These remove a little blade that's coming off. So we see there's sequential blades and significant refits and a lot of different portraying techniques, not to mention a blade tool, which was the only blade tool in all of these caches and concentrations that I had looked at. This is looking at concentration number seven. So that clear material that we were looking at a little bit earlier, obviously that there's a significant presence of portraying elements and lots of little blades and bladelets. They're very regular. So they tend to be regular and some extremely regular blades through here. And then some portraying elements over here. There's a bunch of photos. I just kind of picked up a few of them because they're all coming from different places around the site. This is a concentration of those. So the red had over a hundred of those clear artifacts, those clear-point pieces of debitage. And then this light green area here had about 25 of them. So there's less. But we can see even one of the caches had that clear material in it, which was interesting because they're spatially related to each other within that working floor. Overall, in this particular area, there was over 10,000 artifacts from this red square here. And about between 4,000 and 6,000 in this yellow square and less than 3,000 in this green square. So these are the three that I actually analyzed we can have in four. And then so we see that these computations and the caches are actually placed in those spaces. And so what I ended up kind of determining was that we have likely multiple people represented in this white napping floor. So we have some people who are very highly skilled who are able to produce those 15s and 16s. But then we also have some people who are a little less skilled but still very skilled. So we have people who are producing those 13s and 14s. I think it's most likely that somebody was probably sitting around here and doing that foot napping because anybody who's foot napped knows that all the debitage lands like two feet that way. And so it seems pretty likely that somebody was probably foot napping over here and building up all this debitage over on this side. We have the most skilled cache is actually located right here. And then these two are those, these lower skill caches that we had. So those 13s are showing up there. And then from there, I do believe that foot napping here is a communal behavior or endeavor, right? Where we have at least two foot nappers likely represented between those two different skills, those two different skill levels that we see, although they're both masters, there's that high skill master and the lower skill master. So I think that we're seeing at least two people coming together and possibly more than that. Also from the debitage, novices probably weren't working in this area. And so I want to explore those foot napping floors more thoroughly. I didn't get a chance to be able to do the metric analysis on them. I only did the qualitative analysis on them. And so the qualitative analysis shows that the floors are produced by skilled individuals. So with the ability to go through and do the metric analysis, hopefully I'll be able to kind of tease that apart and maybe see some of those indicators of novices in that space. But without that, basically what I can say at this point is that the novices are not represented within these caches or these concentrations. So yeah, so that was my research. I had a lot of fun doing all like so much foot napping years and years of foot napping and working with a lot of fun people who also got really enthused by foot napping. And I just really enjoyed being able to bring that research and kind of merge it here with the debitage and these assemblages at Piranha Forum. So thank you and got any questions. I'm happy to take them. Can you find the answer there? Part of our thing is that we are left behind by these foot nappers and they're going to remove themselves from the range or what do you think they're working on? Yeah, so I think that there's a potential that the caches are something that people are going to return to. I do also think that there's a potential that they could be winning events as well because the caches are composed of microlytic tools. They're composed of various types of debitage. So they have flakes in them. They have chips in them. But then they also have like portrayal, right? And so they're not just tools. They're not just blades for tool production. They kind of show all of these different aspects of the reduction process, but not the whole unit part of the process. So they notably lack the initial reduction phases. So there's rarely any primary reduction or tablets or anything. It's usually secondary and tertiary reductions that it's showing. So I think it's something that people are likely coming back to, to like modify later and utilize at a different time. Yeah, I think we'll find a solution. Thank you. I think that's one of those kind of fall through. The, you're saying that secondary tertiary reduction is happening in the novice caches as well as in the master caches? Well, so I don't have any novice caches. Like it would be, the all of the caches were in the masterful range. There's just the like less skilled masters and the more skilled masters. And that's the resolution that I have on those. And so all of the caches and concentration themselves generally show at least blades and flakes. And in a lot of cases they usually show blades and portrayal. So there's, there's a range in the center. Did you get the feeling though that like, you know, when I was training in the field job, you know, we were allowed to take bar stock through the mill or the lathe through a certain point as apprentices. And then the master machinists would take over and bring it to fruition as a finished part for a client, right? So they're like, are you getting that sense that the novices were there to do the grunt work? And then the master took over. Yeah, so that's actually one of the things that I want to explore while looking at those wind-epping cores because I know through the experimental work that novices are really capable of producing lots of blades, right? And so if you want somebody to like take the cortex off of like your potential blade cores, like you can hand that to a novice and they'll do a great job. Like they're producing these massive, beautiful primary flakes like wonderful, right? And so you can hand that labor off and like build up their dexterity, build up their hidden eye coordination and still have them interacting with this. So I do believe that that's absolutely a potential and I want to look more into it. Thank you so much. I knew you were switching on the last part of our live. You were really good. Well, I was just going to say this, but I wanted to ask all of your experimental work, excuse me, to allow you to really see that you're a much more stabby body. It doesn't work a lot to create a home. And you're all, we're all like this. You're like, this is really a lot, you're all different. Would you see any style of this? I mean, I'd like to see in the future. Where? I mean, would you? So you don't have that in the past. Yes. It's a really small community. You said, so style, in the old sense, I mean, back, back, back. I, so style is one of the things that I actually wanted to approach. And it was actually the reason why I did a lot of refitting was to be able to understand style. And with the caches in the area A, so where all the six of those caches and concentrations came from, I wasn't able to make enough refits to really be able to get into style. I will say that the concentration in an area E, right? So dozens of meters away does look significantly different. So the blades are actually notable more narrow and they're produced on like a different, a very different type of plant. So it's this very deep chocolatey brown plant as opposed to the light brown plant that we're seeing in area A. And so there are differences within those, like the six in area A and one in area B. And so that one, I do want to explore more. I know that the cache continues on in a different place and I want to explore that and see how many more refits can come from that reduction there. But I think style is also gonna come up a little bit more effectively in this one. So I think being able to actually look at, because there's over 10,000 artifacts in like, it just looks three, like meters square. And so like to be able to look through and explore this entire area, I think that I'll be able to get a better resolution on style and hopefully identify at least. So I'm not necessarily hopeful for individuals, but I am hopeful for like educational and then interest. Well, I'll say only a little bit. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Ms. Lucia, I was wondering if you were in your industries of the learner, do you also have the next thing that you might find that you're not so lucky to have faculty because you sound like you've been walking forward and you've been thinking about it as it seems like some factors and things that it's not. Yes, yeah, I did. I just didn't present it here because I was a little short on time and there's so many statistics. But yes, so things like hinge, like hinge terminations, step terminations, battering on platforms. So we see battering is associated with novices almost exclusively, but we do see crushing, right? So platform crushing is very consistent in intermediates and master's, right? And so like it's a little bit different in like the battering where you have like multiple attempts to try to break something off of brute force versus crushing where you're just using like too heavy of a camera or something. And so we see a lot of crushed platforms in skilled individuals and not so in novices. Step fractures you see pretty consistently across the board in these blade technologies and that's I think more to do with the nature of the actual like shape of the blade force. And then hinging interestingly was something that I found among skilled individuals. So, but so again, so to note, it just the hinge terminations were found with skilled individuals, but they were also able to fix them, right? And so this is the key point because when we see hinging, that then is unable to be fixed, then that's a novice, right? So hinging that is then fixed is something that shows skill. And so, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, so hinging like, you know, is present pretty much across the board, but fixed hinges are associated with skill. Lisa says, thanks. I thought it was going to be a hard question. Yeah, no, it is. Guys. I just wanted to wish you congratulations and thank you so much. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. It's been so hard. Have you been able to get back to us? Not here, but I'm here for you. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. We're doing great. Oh, yeah. That's a good question. We're doing the future. Cool. Let's get back to you. Thank you. I remember I did it. Yeah, I was out here trying. I still got this.